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Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the lean child of working-class Chicago transplants, Judy Grahn hungered to connect with the larger world, to create a place for herself beyond the deprivations and repressions of small town, 1950s life. Refusing the imperative to silence that was her inheritance as a woman and as a lesbian, Grahn found her way to poetry, to activism, and to the intoxicating beauty and power of openly loving other women.

Winner of the Independent Publisher Book "IPPY" Award and an American Book Award!

Throughout her distinguished career, Alice Walker's work has been at the center of controversies around language, censorship, truth, and art. Alice Walker Banned explores just what it is that various groups have found so threatening in Walker's work, bringing together the short stories "Roselily" and "Am I Blue?," an excerpt from the novel The Color Purple, as well as testimonies, letters, and essays about attempts to censor Walker's work by the California State Board of Education.

As the first international anthology of Filipina writers published in the United States, Babaylan reflects the complex history of a people whose roots have stretched to both sides of the globe. With contributions from over 60 Filipina and Filipina American writers, Babaylan provides readers with a comprehensive view of a growing and vibrant transnational literary culture. Challenging, innovative, fierce, reflective, somber, funny—no one word can capture the extraordinary range of this collection.

Combining elements of the real and the fantastic, Beautiful and Dark (Bella y oscura) is written from the perspective of an orphaned girl taken to live with relatives in a derelict neighborhood at the edge of a city. Trying to cope with the mystery and violence of the adult world around her, she is drawn to the Lilliputian Airelei, who fascinates her with fantastic tales that mix myth and memory.

Aunt Lute Books is proud to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Celebrate the beauty and lasting relevance of this foundational text with each sip from our limited edition Borderlands mug.

Chosen as one of the “Best Books of 1987” by Library JournalSelected by Utne Reader as part of its “Alternative Canon” in 1998One of Hungry Mind Review's “Best 100 Books of the 20th Century”

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenge how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps understandings of what a "border" is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

Call Me Woman is the autobiography of Ellen Kuzwayo, a black South African woman whose life as a social worker, woman's rights activist, politican, and more was woven in political history of South Africa for almost 60 years. Kuzwayo 's autobiography documents a complex series of changes in herself and her culture, including the onset and devastation of apartheid.

As LeAnne Howe puts it, “The American Indian adventure stories in Choctalking on Other Realities are three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part ‘marvelous realism.’” The stories in this book “form the heart of [Howe’s] life’s journey so far,” chronicling the contradictions, absurdities, and sometimes tragedies in a life lived crossing cultures and borders.

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This anthology presents the work of over 150 young inner-city poets, reflecting on their experiences with violence and sharing their desires for peace and unity in their families, in their communities, and across the globe. Each poet presents a unique perspective and voice; when read together their work becomes a powerful call for peace. Whether in the hands of educators, peace activists, poetry lovers, or other young writers, City of One is a compelling portrait of a generation of youth who use their words to re-envision the world.

Resisting the onslaught of gringos coming to live in their southwestern border town, Bale and Maggie develop a friendship based on their common struggle. But they differ in their future possibilities: his is closed by poverty and family tragedy; hers is opened by her relationship with her Yaqui Indian grandmother, Adela Sewa. Maggie's grandmother teaches her the ways of the land and her own form of spirituality as tools for survival. Her stories, or cuentos, reach back into the nineteenth century, illuminating a way of life that has disappeared, but which can still provide hope and continuity to a displaced people.

This collection of essays, poetry, and artwork brings together scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa. The diverse voices represented in this collection are gathered from the 2007 national conference and 2009 international conference of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa (SSGA). More than 30 scholars, activists, poets, and artists contributed to El Mundo Zurdo, whose release coincides with the SSGA's second annual international conference in San Antonio, Texas.

Aunt Lute Books is excited to announce the publication of El Mundo Zurdo 2, a collection of diverse essays and poetry that offer scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, selected from the 2010 meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Aunt Lute Books is excited to announce the publication of El Mundo Zurdo 3, the newest collection of diverse essays and poetry that offer scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, selected from the 2012 meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Rooted in a Chicana/Latina/indigenous geographic and cultural sensibility, the stories of flesh to bone take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands. In these nine tales, Silva metes out a furious justice—a whirling, lyrical energy—that scatters the landscape with bones of transformation, reclamation, and healing.

Receive an additional 20% off by using coupon code "SILVA" when you order.

This collection features over 80 essays from two decades of news, analysis, interviews, reviews, and letters from one of the nation's oldest and largest women's newspapers, Sojourner: The Women's Forum. These articles are a microcosm of the lively and committed debates around some of the key issues of second-wave feminism: identity politics, economic injustice, politics of the family, reproductive freedom, women's health, sex and sexuality, violence against women, and building alliances. This anthology is a must for everyone interested in a wide-ranging overview of the contemporary U.S. feminist movement and an in-depth analysis of the issues.

Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.

Haggadah means "the telling." The escape from Egypt is the defining legend, the central drama of the Jews. Every nation coalesces around such an epic; its people project themselves into the story, aspire to the virtues of its heroes, and through periodic retelling or dramatization, transmit their values to the next generation. The traditional Haggadah offers a set of instructions for conducting the Passover service, interspersed with readings from the Bible, rabbinical commentaries, legends, prayers, hymns and children's songs. Written by men and addressing men, the traditional text has not historically offered much space for women to see themselves as fully involved in or spoken to by the powerful drama of human freedom articulated by the Haggadah. In Haggadah: A Celebration of Freedom, Martha Shelley brings a new vision to the traditional text.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Debut Winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction

This is a story about Detroit in the late fifties/early sixties and the Black women and men who came North to work the lines of the Ford Motor plant. It's a story about John R. Street, the Harlem of Detroit, where they spent their nights trying to forget their days—at the Frolic and Flame Showbars, playing Mr. Ben's numbers, sitting on stoops reminiscing about the days of their youth in the South. Irreverent and poetic, this daring novel explores relationships among Black women of different generations and places who, above all, teach each other how to survivenot on men or money but on the courage to move a long ways in tight spaces.

Bold, funny and on the edge, Hot Chicken Wings is Jewish and lesbian to the core. Jyl Lynn Felman breaks new ground in eleven highly crafted stories about family secrets, anti-Semitism, and sacred lesbian myths.

Junglee (stemming from the Sanskrit root "jungle") is used in India to label the wild, the uncivilized, the untamed. Used most commonly as condemnation or censure, it aims to break the spirit of women yearning for personal power. The female protagonists in these eleven stories recklessly pursue their sensual paths through a complex social world that seeks to shut them out. With wily irreverence and a willful rawness, Kamani pulls back the veil of convention, inch by inch, and draws the reader into the disquieting truth of women's lives, charting territory both intimate and bizarre.

The end of the Cultural Revolution in China in 1976 marked the beginning of an exciting phase of literary activity as the state loosened its grip on literature and the arts. One of the most significant developments has been the emergence of scores of women writers articulating female experience and re-opening questions of gender in new fiction. Ding Xiaoqi, whose work in English translation is collected here for the first time, ranks as one of the most daring shapers of this new tradition for her treatment of taboo subjects like rape and adultery, and as one of its most sophisticated stylists for her intense renderings of highly subjective states.

Untangling knots of personal identity and family history, Nancy Agabian deftly weaves a narrative alternately comical and wrenching. Moving between memories of growing up Armenian and American in Walpole, Massachusetts, and her later experiences at Wellesley College, then Hollywood and, finally, Turkey, Agabian offers an illuminating meditation on the sometimes bizarre entanglement of individual desire (sexual and otherwise) in the web of family life and history. At the heart of this unraveling is a grappling with the history of trauma and upheaval experienced by her paternal grandmother, who survived the Armenian Genocide, and the legacy of that wounding experience for Agabian and her extended family.

Miko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1907, but moves back and forth from 1969 during the Vietnam War to present-day Ada. The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding to the term "America's favorite pastime." For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory. In this lively and humorous work of fiction informed by careful historical research, LeAnne Howe weaves original and fictive documents such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries into the narrative.

My Jewish Face & Other Stories chronicles the coming of age and coming out of a daughter of the Jewish left. Wandering from Brooklyn to Harlem and Berkeley in the sixties, from the intense feminist politics of the seventies to the isolation and regathering of activism in the eighties, Kaye/Kantrowitz's women struggle for lesbian community, for proud Jewish identity and for justice steeped in compassion. As humanly warm and funny as they are serious, these stories will reach with great hope and energy across generations and across cultures.

This collection showcases three previously unpublished writers of great talent. Rabie Harris writes about an old Jamaican woman, put into a Texas homecare facility by her daughter. The novella keeps astounding pace as the protagonist reports the unfolding drama of her two roommates. Gloria Yamato, in her three stories and long poem, locates those exact moments when African Americans are forced into painful racialized consciousness. DeeAnne Davis uses the streets of Chicago as a setting for four chapters from her forthcoming novel about an unlikely liaison between a young teenage girl and a gay cabbie.

This compilation is the first comprehensive work to focus on South Asian American and South Asian immigrant women in the U.S. It represents a pioneering effort to collect the critical essays, creative works and personal histories by and about women of South Asian descent. The diverse expressions of identity and experience found here enable us to begin to see how women of South Asian origin define their positions within their respective communities, within wider interethnic networks, and within national and international social, economic, and political frameworks which impact women's lives, both in the United States and in South Asia.

This collection of 20 plays creatively explores the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially as women of color in the United States experience it. Positive/Negative looks at both individual and community issues, ranging from deeply personal reckonings with grief and anger to the broader institutional problems of homophobia, racism, sexism, poverty, and access to health care.

Radical Acts is an innovative compilation of essays and interviews about how feminist approaches to teaching theatre challenge and engage students, teachers, and audiences alike. Contributors include theatre practitioners working in a wide variety of settings and with diverse social groups, offering inspiring accounts of how to create a more inclusive, reflexive, and liberating theatre education. Includes essays by Cherríe Moraga, Rebecca Schneider, and Joni L. Jones/Omi Osun Olomo; interviews with Deb Margolin and Kate Bornstein.

The short stories in Reclaiming Medusa bring a much-needed perspective to the Latin American literary scene. Creating spaces in which the socially prescribed "woman's place" is questioned, problematized, and often subverted, these narratives reclaim women's lost power in ways that are subtle, complex, and sometimes startling. This revised edition contains new stories by Carmen Valle and Carmen Lugo Filippi, as well as a provocative new "Translator's Note" by editor and translator Diana L. Vélez.

Carole Rio, an artist running from her past, is invited to a small Texas border town to paint murals in a church—but the church has burned down in a catastrophic fire. Carole becomes the catalyst for the town's release of its collective guilt, and as the community rebuilds and heals, she faces her own terrifying nightmares and confronts her sexual identity. Send My Roots Rain reveals how memory and land can form potent ties, and how unexpected change has the power to heal and transform lives.

Shadow on a Tightrope is the first anthology to come out of the fat liberation movement. This classic collection includes articles, personal stories, and poems by fat women about their lives, experiences, and the fat-hating society in which we live.

Why was Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the 18th century, assassinated by his own people? Why does his death haunt Auda Billy, an Oklahoma Choctaw woman, accused in 1991 of murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester? Moving between the known details of Red Shoes' life and the riddle of McAlester's death, this novel traces the history of the Billy women whose destiny it is to solve both murders—with the help of a powerful spirit known as the Shell Shaker.

Singing Softly/Cantando Bajito centers around the life of Pilar as told by her granddaughter Meli. The young Pilar's liaison with the son of a monied and proud family cuts her off from her own family, leaves her socially adrift, alone, and, finally, affects her relationship with her oldest friend. It is in the act of narration, moving in soft rhythms and slowly revealed stories, that Meli reclaims her relationship with her grandmother and mother. Reaching out with her imagination, she binds together the three generations of women burdened by secrets and frees herself to come back to the Puerto Rico she has fled.

One hundred years after San Francisco's Great Earthquake of 1906, WritersCorps gathers the powerful voices of San Francisco youth reflecting on solidity, violence, upheaval, and regeneration in their lives and in the world. The poems on these pages are a moving story, eloquent, fragile, courageous, and shattering.

Why would a high school teacher who loves teaching leave school—after half a career in the classroom?

Teacher at Point Blank answers this question at a time when concerns about school performance, safety, and teacher attrition are at an all-time and often anxious high. Meditating on subtle and overt forms of violence in secondary public education from an up-close and “pink collar” point of view, Jo Scott-Coe examines her own workplace as a microcosm of the national compulsory K-12 system, where teachers—now nearly 80% women—find themselves idealized and disparaged, expected to embody the dedication of parents, the coldness of data managers, and the obedience of Stepford spouses.

Teaching at the Crossroads presents an innovative model for teaching multicultural women’s literature that places texts by women of color at the center of the curriculum for all high school and university settings English classes. Highly accessible and designed for practical use, Teaching at the Crossroads includes sample class plans and discussion questions. Combining theory and practice, Grobman presents a much-needed guide for teachers who want to introduce their students to multiple literary traditions.

Volume One of The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers includes over three hundred selections and spans three centuries of women's writings in the U.S. From criminal confessions to politic pamphlets to fiction, plays, poetry, and memoirs, these pages are filled with words of women who embody the complex history of this nation.

The story of U.S. literature in the twentieth century is in many ways the story of the hard won emergence of women's voices—all kinds of women's voices—into print. The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two is an unprecedented effort to capture, in all its scope and variety, the extraordinary results of that florescence.

Originally published in 1980, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals offers a profoundly feminist analysis of her experience with breast cancer and a modified radical mastectomy. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Lorde fuses the personal and political and refuses the silencing and invisibility that she experienced both as a woman facing her own death and as a woman coping with the loss of her breast. The Cancer Journals Special Edition includes photographs by Jean Weisinger and tributes to Audre Lorde written after her death in 1992 by Margaret Cronin, Linda Cue, Elliot, Ayofemi Folayan, Jewelle Gomez, Margaret Randall, Adrienne Rich, Kate Rushin, Elizabeth Sargent, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, and Evelyn White.

The issue is power in this collection of essays, speeches, and reviews spanning 15 years of writing and organizing. Political activist and writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz brings an insightful eye and a sharp analytical mind to address a wide range of issues in contemporary America: race, class, anti-Semitism, lesbian culture, war, sexual power, identity politics, Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, international and domestic violence against and by women. Kaye/Kantrowitz is indomitable in the fight against being worn down, hushed up. Her work reminds us of the strength in community.

Compiled in one book for the first time, featuring both new and out of print pieces, the contents of The Judy Grahn Reader span four decades of work by the prominent writer and activist. This volume contains writing from every phase of Judy Grahn’s career, including poems from all of her major poetry collections, such as “The Common Woman,” “A Woman is Talking to Death,” and the previously unpublished “Mental”; a number of her groundbreaking essays (“Writing from a House of Women” and the newly revised “Ground Zero: The Rise of Lesbian Feminism,” among others); as well as selected fiction and the full-length play The Queen of Swords. As Judy Grahn's writing continues to be relevant in today’s social, political and cultural climate, this comprehensive volume gathers the varying strands of her writing and makes visible the tremendous scope of her ongoing contribution as a feminist thinker, activist, and literary artist.

In this collection of twelve unforgettable short stories, Lara Stapleton writes from the same precarious emotional plane where her characters live. She writes about people living in a world that forces them to recreate daily their small corner of hope. These are people who don't quite fit; who often seem just a little out of step with their circumstances; who have a past to run from but no clear future to run to; who live in the present with the pure ache of longing. They are complex: defiant and helpless, isolated and exposed, sometimes painfully self-aware, sometimes lagging behind the curve.

There’s no story that the Storyteller can’t bring you home from. But in the barrio, her hot pink fluorescent Nike Airs are all that she has to barter for your soul. While the Storyteller leaps tall Teflon cactus, stops powerful locomotives with a story thread and burns up the devil incarnate, the people of the barrio stories quietly and courageously triumph over poverty and despair. Kleya Forté-Escamilla gives us worlds of real and magic possibility.

This is the English translation of the extraordinarily popular Mexican novel that remained on Mexico's Top Ten Best Sellers list long after its initial publication. The protagonist of the novel, Valeria, is a member of a well-to-do Jewish family in Mexico City. She is married and has two sons. Intelligent and sensitive, she realizes that the traditional conventions of her culture and subculture have made her unable to be a whole person, acting as a relatively free agent in the world. Then she falls passionately in love with a woman, and, against tremendous family pressure, finds the courage to leave her conventional life to become the writer she has wanted to be. All the elements of a true romance written with fine literary sensibility.

This collection brings together an unprecedented range of beautifully crafted short stories by women that span a century and a half of African American literary tradition. Editor Asha Kanwar's introduction provides historical background and context for the selection of stories by authors as varied as Alice Dunbar Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, and Wanda Coleman. The writers included here, both the famous and the less well-known, together represent the remarkable diversity of African American women's writing across class, culture and time.

Young Indiana Redpaint, traded by her father for a rodeo entry fee, flees Oklahoma to be raised by her grandparents in North Carolina. A generation later, her daughter Manna, whose life is deeply marked by her mother's losses, runs from her own tragic past and catches up with her destiny—guided by a cast of unforgettable characters: Candy, a two-year old baby girl abandoned by her mother Sugar Begay; Silas Pipe, a Vietnam veteran with a glitzy past who has built an oasis in the desert; J.B., his grass-dancing nephew; and Bill Lawton, a widowed carpenter who can chisel life out of wood. Here in Gallup, New Mexico, Manna eventually finds wholeness and healing in unexpected people and places.

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows starts where the rest of the world leaves Indians off: at the brink of death. Ephanie Atencio is in the midst of a breakdown from which she can barely move. She has been left by her husband and is unable to take care of her children. To heal, Ephanie must seek, however gropingly, her own future. She leaves New Mexico for San Francisco, where she begins again the process of remembering, of trying to sort out the parts of her, ultimately finding a way to herself, relying no longer on men, but on her primary connections to the spirit women of her people and to the women of her own world.

Animal stories have been handed down through the rich oral traditions of over five hundred distinct American Indian languages and cultures, offering understanding about and guidance to the natural and social worlds. The fiction and poetry gathered in this collection honor these traditions, retelling and reshaping traditional narratives by recalling their ancient wisdom and renewing their spirit in new contexts.

After years of teaching women's studies courses and seeing the frustration, paralysis, and depression of young students who grapple with the hard realities of social activism, Leela Fernandes has written a social critique that examines contemporary feminism and social justice movements. She discusses straightforwardly the problems with social justice organizations, academia, and identity politics. She also poses a solution: that individuals—feminists and other social justice activists—create their own non-institutional spiritual base, one that will sustain them through the hard ethical choices needed in contemporary social justice activism.